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  • Course description

    Instructor: Karl Hall

    Number of credits: 2 

    Course level: MA

    Time: Tuesdays, 15:30-17:10. If there are time-zone issues for some students, a second meeting time is possible. 

    Place: TBA. If online, this is the Zoom link

    Prerequisites: None: no background in history of science or musicology or acoustics is assumed. 

    Course aims: I'm a cultural historian, you're a cultural historian, we are all cultural historians. The hermeneutic techniques that we apply to literary, political, or religious texts have become the common currency of the profession, and these in turn enable us to build up the corpus of conventions, practices, transmissions, receptions, mental habits, social relations, and even bodily gestures that can feed into works of cultural history. Anthropology, literary theory, and philosophy have all become methodological resources in varying degrees for the aspiring cultural historian. In this course we will study a complex of phenomena that can help us sharpen our own sensibilities about the proper bounds of cultural history (and perhaps even our logocentrism). Although sound as such may seem too generic and natural to tackle with the techniques of cultural history, it, too, is part of material culture, and understanding its mechanisms of production and perception is indispensable to joining the larger professional conversation about the history of the senses, which so often privileges visuality.

    Music offers a further set of challenges. While it may be more obviously the product of cultural signs and conventions than mere sound, music-making is a constant rebuke to our modern tendency to draw strong distinctions between Nature and Culture. Ordinarily we cultural historians might be inclined to leave the "technical" aspects of that interface to musicologists, and simply focus on popular audiences, musical institutions, and resonances with broader cultural politics. The present instructor is not a musicologist, but still regards this seminar as a safe space for laymen to learn more than they might otherwise about the "natural" constraints on music composition, and the ways in which historically durable musical conventions or styles can be (de)naturalized in service to cultural ends. By the same token, we will learn to recognize the historical musicologist's tendency to adopt the synoptic view, and take that as cautionary in our own struggles with the antinomies of text/context. That is to say, our search for the coherence and unity of a musical work as object of Culture should not lead us to reinstantiate them in our own analyses. 

    With each passing week in the seminar we will try to incorporate more readings from Central and Eastern Europe. Sometimes the choice is overdetermined, in the sense that the CEE text is already a constituent part of a notional Western canon with which the student needs to familiarize herself. Yet the choice of CEE texts will at times be aimed at forcing us to look beyond a perceived canon, or at least test its bounds. There is a growing body of secondary literature on cultures of listening, and we should both use our CEE expertise to enrich it as well as to offer critiques. The rise of new spaces and new technologies for listening to music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will in turn permit us to look afresh at the subjectivities of musical taste and consumption. Radio transmission, electronic amplification, and rapidly growing urban spaces then lead us naturally to the final theme of the course: noise. What it was in subjective and objective terms, how it was quantified, how it became an object of (cultural) politics, how it could be contained: this will complete our repertoire.

    Note on primary sources: Each session has a default primary source in English available to everyone. Where sources permit in a given session, the course includes supplementary Central and East European views of the topics under discussion in the original languages, and these Czech, Hungarian, Polish, etc., options may be substituted as desired.

    Learning outcomes:
     Students will sharpen their vocabulary for employing the techniques of cultural history. They will be introduced to aural concepts essential to the history of the senses; basic musicological concepts relevant to general cultural history; and basic acoustic concepts relevant to the urban history of aural spaces.

    Assessment: One presentation in class: 20%; class discussion leader: 10%; soundscape exercise: 10%; review essay: 50%; general class participation: 10%.

    Review essay: 8-9 double-spaced pages (12-point font, no fiddling with the default margins; Chicago Manual of Style, full notes). Topics chosen in consultation with the instructor.  

    Soundscape exercise: TBA (resources permitting, this will be a chance to "read" a musical space of your choice)

    Deadline: April 16

  • General resources

    Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2002). [621.3/893 STE]

    Daniel Morat, ed., Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe (2014). [306.09/4 MOR]

    Tim Blanning, The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art (2008). [306.4/8409/4 BLA]

    Sven Oliver Müller and Jürgen Osterhammel, "Geschichtswissenschaft und Musik," Geschichte und Gesellschaft38 (2012): 5-20.


    Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012). [621.3/893 PIN]

    A collection of texts on the history of acoustics and music listening (ECHO)

    Visit the Recorded Sound Research Center at the U.S. Library of Congress, especially the collection of early motion pictures and sound recordings

  • [1] January 12 — Sound in the history of the senses

    Assigned reading:

    Alain Corbin, "Charting the cultural history of the senses," in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. D. Howes (2005), 128-139. 

    Further reading:

    Daniel Morat, ed., Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th Century Europe (2014). 

    Mark M. Smith, “Sound—So What?,” The Public Historian 37, no. 4 (2015): 132–44.

    Mark M. Smith, "Futures of hearing pasts," in Sounds of Modern History, 13-22.

    Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (2014).

    Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012). [621.3/893 PIN]

    Jan-Friedrich Missfelder, “Period Ear. Perspektiven einer Klanggeschichte der Neuzeit,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012): 21–47.

    Sophia Rosenfeld, “On Being Heard: A Case for Paying Attention to the Historical Ear,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (2011): 316–34.


    Robert Jütte, A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace (2005). [151.1 JUT]

    Alexander M. Martin, "The sensory in Russian and Soviet history," in Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks, eds., Russian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Present (2016).

    Jane F. Fulcher, "Defining the new cultural history of music, its origins, methodologies, and lines of inquiry," The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music (2011).

    Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, “Cultural History: Where It Has Been and Where It Is Going,” Central European History 51 (2018): 75–82.

    Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? (2004/2008/2019)

    Johannes Müller on the sense of hearing (1840).

    Gyula Kornis on the senses (1919).

    János Ranke on the sense of hearing (1875).

    [Prince Odoevskii's musical telegraph alphabet -- click on image for source]

  • [2] January 19 — Music is (not) like language

    Assigned reading:

    Eduard Hanslick, "Music in its relation to nature," from The Beautiful in Music, 7th ed. (1885/1891 [1854]), 143–159. [Consult original German text.] [Polish]

    Hanslick makes extended references to Beethoven's Egmont (1810). You may listen to the familiar overture:

     

    Beethoven's Egmont was written for a revival of Goethe's play Egmont (1788), in turn invoking the Count of Egmont, the Flemish grandee executed by the Duke of Alba in 1568 during the Dutch war of independence.

    Jonathan Christian Petty, "Hanslick, Wagner, Chomsky: Mapping the linguistic parameters of music," J. Royal Musical Association 123 (1998): 39–67.

    Further reading:

    Mark Burfurd, "Hanslick's idealist materialism," 19th-Century Music 30 (2006): 166-181.

    Alexander Wilfing, "Hanslick, Kant, and the Origins of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen," Musicologica Austriaca: Journal for Austrian Music Studies (2018).

    Alexandra Hui, The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (2013), 23-53.

    Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (2014). [781.1 BON]

    [click on image for source]

  • [3] January 26 — Modern musical form is (not) constrained by nature

    Assigned reading:

    Hermann von Helmholtz, "General view of the different principles of musical style in the development of music" and "Esthetical relations," from On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music , 4th ed. (1877/1885 [1863]), 234–237, 246–249, 362–371. [online] [German] [Russian]

    Hugo Riemann, "Ideas for a study 'On the imagination of tone'," part I (1914–1915), J. Music Theory 36 (1992): read pages 81–91 only.

    Go to the music module, "What is permitted? The nature of music".

    Further reading:

    Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (2012). [781.1 STE]

    Myles Jackson, "From scientific instruments to musical instruments: The tuning fork, the metronome, and the siren," The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012), 201-223.

    Hui, The Psychophysical Ear, 55-87.

    Alexander Rehding, Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (2003). (on campus access)

    P. P. Lazarev, "Muzykal'nyi konsonans i dissonans v svete sovremennoi nauki," Sovetskoe iskusstvo no. 7 (1926): 43-49.

    [click on image for source]

  • [4] February 2 — Was classical music German?

    Bohemian MuseClick on "Listen to audio clips in context" below for greater detail about the musical assignments.

    Assigned readings:

    Carl Dahlhaus, "Nationalism and music," Between Romanticism and Modernism (1980), 79–101.

    Fryderyk Chopin, Sonata in B-flat minor, op. 35, first movement (1836):

     

    Robert Schumann, "New sonatas for piano" (excerpt), Gesammelte Schriften für Musik und Musiker, vol. 4 (1854 [1841]), 21–25. [German]

    Mikhail Glinka, symphonic fantasy Kamarinskaia (1848):

     

    Marina Frolova-Walker, "Against Germanic reasoning: The search for a Russian style of musical argumentation," in Musical Constructions of Nationalism (2001), 104–122.

    Further reading:

    Celia Applegate, “How German Is It? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century,” 19th-Century Music 21 (1998): 274–96.

    Ed. de B... v..., "De la musique au dix-neuvième siècle," Le Figaro (27 January 1839).

    Kornél Ábrányi, "A nemzetiesség jogosultsága a művészetben s főleg a zenészetben," Fővárosi Lapok (1 January 1874): 5-6.

    David Brodbeck, Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna. Defining Deutschtum (2014). 

    ["Bohemian Muse" -- Click on image for larger version]

  • [5] February 9 — Folk music through modern eyes

    Assigned reading:

    Béla Bartók, "On Hungarian music" (1911), from Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (1976), 301–303.

    Judit Frigyesi, "Béla Bartók and the concept of nation and Volk in modern Hungary," The Musical Quarterly 78 (1994):255–287. 

    Frigyesi discusses something called "verbunkos," and you can immediately get a sense of the force of her argument by sampling from this traditional rendering:

     

    Now listen to popular composer Ferenc Erkel's chamber music version, nominally in the same style:

     

    Go to music module, "Beyond Romanticism".

    Further reading:

    Hermann Laroche, "Новый сборник русских народных мелодий" (1888), Музыкально-критические статьи, 148-156.

    [click on image for source]

  • [6] February 16 — Listening in Central and Eastern Europe

    Assigned reading:

    Anton Borkowsky, "A musical fantasy," Der Humorist (21 July 1842). [original German]

    Leon Botstein, “Listening through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience,” 19th-Century Music 16 (1992): 129–45.

    Hungarian option: "Zene és közönség," Magyar Géniusz no. 52 (1895): 863-864.

    Further reading:

    Markian Prokopovych, In the Public Eye: The Budapest Opera House, the Audience and the Press, 1884-1918 (2014). [782.1/09/439 PRO]

    Antje Pieper, Music and the Making of Middle-Class Culture: A Comparative History of Nineteenth-Century Leipzig and Birmingham (2008). [306.4/8409/4 PIE]

    James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (1995).

    Sven Oliver Müller, "The invention of silence: Audience Behavior in Berlin and London in the nineteenth century," in Sounds of Modern History, 153-174.

    Sven Oliver Müller, “Die Politik des Schweigens. Veränderungen im Publikumsverhalten in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012): 48–85.

    Hui, The Psychophysical Ear, 123-148.

    Lynn M. Sargeant, Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life (2011). [780.9/47]

    [click on image for source]

  • [7] February 23 — Recording culture: Comparative musicology and the phonograph

    Assigned reading:

    Julia Kursell, "A gray box: The phonograph in laboratory experiments and fieldwork, 1900-1920," The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012), 176-197.

    Aural diversion:

    A student of Franz Brentano, Carl Stumpf saw psychology as the starting point for the other philosophical disciplines. He wrote The Psychology of Musical Sounds (1883) after taking a professorship in Prague, because (as he wrote in his autobiography) "the strange romantic city on the Moldau appealed to my innate wanderlust." Stumpf went considerably beyond Helmholtz in his research on the psychological perception of musical aesthetics. One phenomenon he commented upon was the discrepancy between the objective possibility of extending pitches infinitely in both directions (high frequencies and low frequencies), but the finite range of human audible resolution. We can imagine these higher notes, though we cannot hear them, but what is the psychological relation between the two? We assume that if our physiological aural range could be extended, each new note would fall naturally within our representation system and would somehow be a "natural" extension of it. But, asked Stumpf, "Is there any characteristic of notes as we hear them that justifies this supposition? Can we not equally well imagine that a prolongation of the note-series might eventually prove to be circular in character, and that as a pitch grew higher we might find ourselves back in the familiar tonal sphere, like the traveller who travels westward in what he supposes to be a straight line, though he is in fact describing a circle? It is clear that we are being led in the tonal sphere to confront a question analogous to that which has often been asked in relation to space: is space (in Riemann's definition) truly infinite or is it merely unlimited, like a circle or a ball? Here we are considering this question only from the psychological point of view." The nature of Stumpf's question can be grasped by considering a curious phenomenon: If different octaves sound "equivalent," then we may separate the phenomenon of pitch into two parts, chroma and tone-height. Chroma, or color, tells us where a pitch stands in relation to others within a given octave, while tone-height tells us which octave the pitch belongs to. Most pitches generated by musical instruments are not single pure frequencies, but a superposition of frequencies, all of which are multiples ("harmonics") of one fundamental frequency. It is actually possible to use cleverly varying combinations of harmonics to create the audible impression of changing (upward) chroma, but without changing tone-height and passing beyond the audible range. This sequence is known as a Shepard scale (courtesy of Audiolabs Erlangen):

     

    (Here is a mathematical visualization of the effect.)

    Further reading:

    Julia Kursell, “Listening to More Than Sounds: Carl Stumpf and the Experimental Recordings of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv,” Technology and Culture 60 (2019): S39–63.

    Susan Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture, and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP (2013).

    Carl Stumpf on the Berlin phonogram archive (1908). [in German]

    Robert Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph, 3rd ed. (1977). 

    Alexander Rehding, "Wax cylinder revolutions," The Musical Quarterly 88 (2005): 123-160. 

  • [8] March 2 — Modern music: Atonality, ahistoricism, atavism

    Assigned reading: 

    V. G. Karatygin, "The Rite of Spring" (1914), Izbrannye stat'i (1965), from Russians on Russian Music, 1880-1917: An anthology, ed. Stuart Campbell (2003), 213–219.

    Leon Botstein, "Schoenberg and the audience: Modernism, music, and politics in the twentieth century," including an excerpt from Karol Szymanowski's "On the question of 'contemporary music'," from Schoenberg and His World, ed. Walter Frisch (1999), 19–54. 

    Go to music module "Experimentation and history".

    Further reading:

    Richard Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (1996).

    Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (1997).

    Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 4 (2010).

    Robert W. Wason, Viennese Harmonic Theory from Albrechtsberger to Schenker and Schoenberg (1985).

    Image: Vasily Kandinsky, "Image III (Concert)" (1911). 

  • [9] March 9 — Symphony of Sirens

    Avraamov directing the symphony of sirensAssigned reading:

    Arsenii Avraamov, "Terminvox," Rabis no. 23 (1927): 8. (original Russian)

    Leonid Sabaneev, "Musical tendencies in contemporary Russia," Musical Quarterly 16 (1930): 469–481.

    Theodor W. Adorno, "The curves of the needle" (1927), Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (2002), 271–276. 

    Go to music module "The symphony of sirens."

    Further reading:

    Arsenii Avraamov, "Novaia era muzyki," Sovetskoe iskusstvo no. 3 (1925): 66-69.

    Arsenii Avraamov, "Vosstanie muzyki," Sovetskoe iskusstvo no. 4-5 (1925): 77-80.

    Arsenii Avraamov, "Elektrifikatsiia muzyki," Sovetskoe iskusstvo no. 1 (1928): 61-66.

    Nik. Roslavets, "Staraia i novaia muzyka," Sovetskoe iskusstvo no. 4 (1927): 29-36.

    Olga Panteleeva, “How Soviet Musicology Became Marxist,” The Slavonic and East European Review 97, no. 1 (2019): 73–109.

  • [10] March 16 — Radio and the modern ear

    Assigned reading:

    Velimir Khlebnikov, "The radio of the future," (1921) Collected Works, vol. 1, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (1987), 392–396. [Original Russian]

    Suzanne Lommers, “Broadcasting a Musical Culture,” in Europe - On Air: Interwar Projects for Radio Broadcasting (2012), 235–88. 

    Further reading:

    Stephen Lovell, Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919-1970 (2015). [Sign into Oxford Scholarship Online for electronic copy.]

    Margarete Vöhringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der frühen Sowjetunion (2007).

    [click on image for source] Image entitled "Arts appreciation." "He can't bear modern music yet. At any moment I'll have to change his pants."

  • [11] March 23 — Sound film and new sonic environments

    Assigned reading:

    S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, and G. M. Aleksandrov, “The sound film: A statement from the U.S.S.R.,” Close Up 3 (1928), reprinted in Close Up 1927–1923: Cinema and Modernism, eds. J. Donald et al. (1998), 83–84. (Russian)

    Silent versus sound film in Ilf and Petrov's The Little Golden Calf (1931). (Russian)

    Lilya Kaganovsky, "Introduction: The long transition: Soviet cinema and the coming of sound," The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928-1935 (2018). [via JSTOR]

    Hungarian options: Béla Balázs, "Movietone, a beszélő film," Korunk 3 no. 9 (1928): 646-647. 
    Sándor Székely, "Felfordult világ," Magyar Rádió Újság 6 (1929): 23-25.

    Russian option: L. V. Kuleshov, "Принципы звукового монтажа," in Практика кинорежиссуры (1935), 22-32.

    Czech option: Franta Kocourek, "Nástup zvukového filmu," Přitomnost (27 June 1929): 391-393. 

    Further reading:

    Emily Thompson, “Dead Rooms and Live Wires: Harvard, Hollywood, and the Deconstruction of Architectural Acoustics, 1900-1930,” Isis 88, no. 4 (1997): 597–626.

    Allison Whitney, “Cultivating Sonic Literacy in the Humanities Classroom,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 2, no. 2 (2008): 145–48.

    Mark Kerins, “A Statement on Sound Studies: (With Apologies to Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov),” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 2, no. 2 (2008): 115–19.

    Tim Boon, “The Cinematic Sound of Industrial Modernity:: First Notes,” in Being Modern, ed. Robert Bud et al., The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century (UCL Press, 2018), 40–57.

    See the section on Avraamov's film-sound research at Monoskop.

    Andrey Smirnov on graphical sound.
  • [12] March 30 — Our most abused sense: Noise, nerves, and the modern city

    Assigned reading:

    Arthur Schopenhauer, "On noise" (1851). (German) (Russian)

    Daniel Morat, “The Sound of a New Era: On the Transformation of Auditory and Urban Experience in the Long Fin de Siècle, 1880–1930,” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 7 (2019).

    Further reading:

    Emily Thompson, “Making Noise in The Roaring ’Twenties: Sound and Aural History on the Web,” The Public Historian 37, no. 4 (2015): 91–110.

    Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (2008).

    James G. Mansell, "Neurasthenia, civilization, and the sounds of modern life: Narratives of nervous illness in the interwar campaign against noise," in Sounds in Modern History, 278-302.

    Bruce Johnson, "Sites of sound," Oral Tradition 24 (2009).

    Shannon Mattern and Barry Salmon, “Sound Studies: Framing Noise,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 2, no. 2 (2008): 139–44.

    Peter Payer, “The Age of Noise: Early Reactions in Vienna, 1870—1914,” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 5 (2007): 773–93.

    John M. Picker, Victorian Soundscapes (2003).

    [click on image for source]

    Caption: (Professor Ostwald has proposed to align [syntonize] – car horns, bicycle bells, street tram clappers, etc. – to a particular key for the protection of nervous dispositions.)

    “Man, don’t whistle in D-minor! Now you’re part of the street noise, you have to whistle in C-major!”